Congratulations to Gear it Forward 2338 FIRST Robotics Competition team, sponsored by Caterpillar, Navistar and SD308. They are headed to the FIRST World Championships at the end of April after winning the Midwest Regional Chairman's Award. The Chairman's Award is the most prestigious award at FIRST, it honors the team that best represents a model for other teams to emulate and best embodies the purpose and goals of FIRST.

This past weekend the FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) - Midwest Regional robotics competition was held at the UIC Pavilion in Chicago. Fifty two teams of high school students, mostly from the US, as far as Pennsylvania and New York, as well as two teams from Turkey (Kocaeli and Ankara) competed on the field with their robots and made presentations about their impact with STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) in their community.The Oswego Robotics Team - Gear It Forward (team 2338 - Oswego High School and Oswego East High School) was one of those teams. They worked their way up through the qualification rounds, and after losing 2 of their first 3 matches, came back to be ranked 3rd after all qualifications. During alliance selection (for the playoffs alliances of 3 teams are formed by selection by the highest ranked teams), Gear It Forward was selected by the 2nd place team to be a part of the 2nd seeded alliance.Throughout the quarter-finals and semi-finals the alliance won 4 straight matches to advance to the final round. This included the high score of the competition with 189 points. The final matches, between the top 2 seeded alliances, were hard fought, but in the end the first seed alliance won and Gear It Forward's alliance ended up in second place… for the third year in a row. This earned the team their first trophy of the day. This did not earn them a trip to the World Championship, but if teams on the winning alliance had already earned their spot at the Championship, then a wild card opportunity might be available.

During all of the robot competitions, each team also made a presentation to a panel of judges describing how their team has helped spread and grow STEM in their community. Gear It Forward's Chairman's team presented on Friday afternoon, but the results of that competition would not be known until the final award of the competition. That is because the Chairman's award is actually the most prestigious prize in FIRST.

One of the highlights of the competition was that team 5847 Ironclad (Bradley Bourbonnais Community High School) won the Rookie Award and earned a trip to the Championship. Ironclad was formed just last year with mentoring from Gear It Forward.

It turns out that the wild card spot at Championships was not needed because Gear It Forward earned the Chairman's award for the second year in a row which automatically qualifies them for a trip to St. Louis and the FIRST World Championship.